Yah, I had to manually install the driver in mint for the nvidia card, and had to change a setting in the bios to get the system to even see the card. But it works fine other than that. I’m considering going with an AMD card next time I get a computer, largely because I hear they work a lot better with Linux.
I think Microsoft has been trying to build towards cloud computing of everything on user devices.
Games pass seems to have been them building towards a Google stadia type system. Getting a large user base of monthly subscribers used to Spotify like game experience, and then slowly running more and more off of the user device.
The contraction of studios, internal fighting, and this price hike makes me think they’re is some internal opposition to go all in on this, even as they go full speed ahead on the windows side of things.
Proton is steam’s compatibility tool, these “medals” basically indicate how well a game works through it. Platnium and gold mean work without troubleshooting. Silver means a little tinkering with settings. Bronze means it can work with effort, and borked means it just doesn’t work.
So, 84% working with 0 effort, and 11% working with light tinkering.
The post is kind of incomprehensible if you’re not already familiar with proton and the troubleshooting website proton DB.
Of the 17 games I’ve played over the past 9~ months since installing mint Linux and steam proton, only 2 base games have had issues and 2 games I’ve had trouble modding. I think it’s a discussion worth having so let me go through the few issues I’ve had in regards to games on Mint Linux (Ubuntu based). 2 problems were resolved without issue, 1 was a qualified success, and one I gave up on trying to mod.
To be clear this is all on an intel Intel 7700HQ CPU and nvidia GTX1060 GPU. It’s not the newest or top of the line anymore but it’s still plenty capable.
Foxhole: there was a week about a 2 months ago where I had to launch it through lutris because proton was having an issue with loading in to the map. As far as I could gather, the devs had updated shaders or some libraries to fix a glitch with small trains hovering at max map height, and this caused issue with proton being unable to load shaders. Using lutris (which I think uses wine?) fixed the issue and the devs fixed the issue with proton about a week later.
Helldivers 2: extremely bad frame rates and straight up locking up the computer part way through the intro or tutorial. I think it was an issue with the graphics card memory just getting filled up and not clearing. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix it, but it involved caping the FPS at 60 FPS. It works now but only with low settings and I still get a bad frame rates when the map gets crowded.
Then there was modding games that had some issue. Both of them were older games that relied on patchers.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: Worked great as the base game. The patcher for the unofficial fan patch was a .exe though, so I added it to steam and ran it with proton, it couldn’t find the game files and I had to manually direct it to the files in proton’s mock windows file structure, but after that it patched and worked fine from there.
Fallout: New Vegas: The base game ran flawlessly (well as flawlessly as base game New Vegas can run), same procedure as above, opened patcher and mod manger by adding to steam and opening with proton, directed them to the weirdly placed files, but this time they didn’t recognize the game files and refused to patch. I fiddled with it for a bit, but gave up because I didn’t care that much.
Again I want to emphasize that these are 4 out of 17 games, only one of which had persistent issues, and one that I gave up on trying to mod. None straight up wouldn’t run and none were unplayable after a bit of tinkering. This is about the same rate of tinkering I was doing back in windows to get things running the way I wanted with games.
There is a lot of work left to do here, but playing games on Linux is absolutely doable even if you’re not particularly tech savvy. if you don’t have the patience to trouble shoot, you will be fine 9 times out of 10. I’m more tech savvy than the average bear, but I don’t work in tech nor do I have a formal education.
I think it’s very fun, but a bit light in content at the moment, understandable as it is in early access.
The ground work and mechanics are clearly there already. It needs fleshing out, a lot really. But the visions is amazing, it feels like what I thought AOE2 was when I was 12
Signalis is a 2.5d top down 3rd person single player survival horror title available for switch, it is probably one of the best modern examples of the genera taking clear inspiration from older titles like silent hill and resident evil 2. It’s very story based and currently on sale for the switch, I would highly recommend it.
It is a new game, but it very much has an old school vibe and is clearly leaning strongly on what made older titles great.
I played Signalis and really enjoyed it, I actually found it a bit inspiring, if a truly tragic game. The core gameplay was fun and engaging, the puzzles never felt grating or frustrating and completing them or figuring them out was quite rewarding. Although never obvious and requiring some thinking, they never felt like total moon logic like so many puzzle or adventure games. The combat was a good mix of resource management and brought just enough tension without interfering with puzzles.
The story and aesthetic was probably the highlight though, it wears its cultural influences on its sleeves, classic cosmic horror, evangelion, ghost in the shell, 2001 a space odyssey. It brings some new elements to the mix as well, notably an East German aesthetic and the existential personal dread of living in a totalitarian surveillance state. At once dread inducing and tragic, but also beautiful. I’m very curious to see more from the duo who made it, and am curious if they’ll do more in the setting or move on to something else.
KSP with the realism overhaul mod and realistic progression 1.
I just never get over the beauty of seeing a dual centaur upper stage gently drift away from an atlas booster before lighting up those stunning twin blue flames, careening deep in to the abyss of space.
Radio Commander has instantaneous communication with the units, it being over radio, and you’re only really interacting with your own units, sometimes you’ll operate near allied units in a mission and have to make sure your units properly identify contacts before engaging.
But the core mechanics are that you’re sending out requests for information to units and orders to move and engage, but you cannot see where they are on the map, you can put markers down on the map, but like that’s just you best guess of their postion based on what coordinates they gave you. The coms basically always work perfectly, although there are options that will make it so units can get lost or make mistakes in their reports back to you.